EXAMPLES

Collected via e-mail, July 2016

RATING

ORIGIN

On 29 July 2016, the Burrard Street Journal published an article reporting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had issued a tweet lamenting America’s decision to give Canada its “independence”:

DONALD J. Trump has told Fox and Friends that he believes the U.S. “should never have allowed” Canada to gain independence. The republican candidate for president freely admits to being “a little rusty” on Canadian history, but feels confident that the United States owned Canada “at some point”, and claims giving it back was a “major mistake”.

The former reality TV star was responding to a question about Puerto Rico possibly becoming the 51st of the United States, when he made the statement. “It used to be 51 you know, when we had Canada,” Trump said, pointing to an American flag, “Or 52 if you count Mexico which I never will, no matter how much they beg.”

The interviewer Brian Kilmeade, seemed unmoved by Trump’s remark and asked him to explain his understanding of Canadian/American history, as the Fox host began scribbling notes:

“I personally think it was the biggest mistake in American history, giving Canada back. Look at that place now, it’s falling to pieces. It’s overrun by godless, gunless hippies and it’s such a shame to see.”

“I’m not sure there is any evidence to support this theory, Donald,” Kilmeade intervened. “I mean wasn’t Canada founded by Britain and France who invaded–” “No, are you kidding me?” Trump interrupted. “You think that either of those guys know the first thing about war? No Canada has belonged to America since Jesus’ time, and that’s a fact.”

Shortly after the controversial interview, Trump reiterated his stance towards Canada with a tweet that was deleted 20 minutes later, not before being retweeted over 6,000 times.

Directly beneath the article was a purported screenshot of Trump’s purported tweet:

While the article was composed in a manner that made the exchange sound disappointingly plausible, the Burrard Street Journal‘s “about” page clearly states otherwise:

The Burrard Street Journal is a satire, parody and comedy news site. All articles, videos and images are fictitious and occasionally intended to be humourous. Please feel free to copy and paste this into your comments to prove this site is “bullshit”. Check out our disclaimer below for more info.

All burrardstreetjournal.com, FM News or FM Football News articles are satirical and entirely fabricated.

Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to sports personalities and/or celebrities, in which case they are based on real people, but still based almost entirely in fiction.

Please feel free to copy and paste this disclaimer into you facebook comment to “prove this site’s bullshit”.

This site is a source of parody, satire, and humor and is for entertainment purposes only … Said posts or stories may or may not use real names, always in semi-real and/or mostly, or substantially, fictitious ways. Therefore, all news articles contained within burrardstrettjournal.com are works of fiction and constitute fake news.

A continually visible sidebar of articles published by the Burrard Street Journal includes headlines as preposterous as the report about Trump’s Canadian independence tweet: